ASL® and BiSL® – Use, trademarks, copyright and accreditations

The ‘Stichting Application Services Library en Business Information Services Library Foundation’ was established on 25 April 2002. The shorter name is ‘ASL BiSL Foundation®’.

The goal of ASL BiSL Foundation is:“To contribute to the professionalization of the use and the delivery process of the information provisioning, by means such as maintenance and dissemination of public domain libraries for application management and business information management, and any activity that is related to the aforementioned or contributes to it.”

The purpose of the reference “public domain libraries” is to make clear that anybody is allowed to have use of these libraries. Some rules apply to assure the quality and coherence of the libraries, as described in this document.

The ASL and BiSL libraries contain books, articles, white papers, best practices, presentations et cetera. ASL and BiSL are also process frameworks, described in books that are part of the libraries.

ABF has applied an important starting point related to “Public Domain” by allowing free use of the libraries. ‘Free use’ explicitly does not mean modifying the frameworks and presenting these as if they are an authentic form of the ASL or BiSL framework.

To this goal, ABF acts as owner / “design authority” and owns the trademarks that are applied to logo’s, colours and everything else needed to assure the authenticity of the frameworks.

Any party that wants to provide training, provide consulting, conduct examinations, or provide the market with other commercial services based on ASL and/or BiSL frameworks, which action includes use of the ASL, BiSL or ASL BiSL Foundation logo etc., is obliged to apply to the ASL BiSL Foundation to become accredited and to receive a licence to use any of these marks and the associated Intellectual Property.

ABF can engage an institute (or multiple institutes if ABF so decides) to accredit third parties of behalf of ABF in order to assure professionals of the consistency of and between the libraries. ABF can decide to fulfil this role itself. ABF has appointed The APM Group Limited (APMG) per May 1st 2012 as the accreditation body for the ASL and BiSL schemes, see training accreditor.

Parties can apply to ABF with proposals for additions and/or changes to the frameworks. If these proposals are rejected, parties may process these additions and/or changes in their own services but in so doing, forfeit the right to accreditation of these services by ABF. Such parties are then obliged to inform their clients/contacts unambiguously of this situation.

Additions to the libraries that are based on the frameworks, such as didactic applications, consulting frameworks, articles and books about the frameworks, that according to ABF differ from the libraries, are the intellectual property of the parties who have made the additions.

In short, the ”public domain status” of ASL and BiSL entails:
1. Anybody can use the content of the libraries
2. Anybody can apply to the owner/design authority for accreditation
3. The owner/design authority monitors the quality of the libraries and takes appropriate action.

What does this mean in practical terms?

Accreditation
ABF differentiates between accreditation for training, examination and other kinds of activities:
1. ABF has contracted a third party for training accreditation and for providing the ASL and BiSL exams and certificates. See Education.
2. ABF fulfils the role of accreditor of examination institutes and uses ISO 17024 as its terms of reference.
3. If and when the need arises for accreditation for other kinds of activities, the ABF Architectural Board will be asked for advice.

Use of libraries for training and other purposes
1. The foundation-level exams are based on the books ‘ASL 2, A framework for Application Management’ and ‘BiSL, A framework for business information management’. See Education.
2. Additional training material that is approved by ABF is available for accredited training organizations. This is available via the training accreditor.
3. Training organizations are obliged to have their own training material accredited by the training accreditor.
4. Training organizations are permitted to quote illustrations and text from the books in their own training material as long as the goal justifies the amount of illustrations and text quoted and the source is mentioned.
5. Prior written permission from the publisher/author of the book(s) is required for use of literal texts from the book(s).
6. ABF owns the copyright of white papers, best practices and presentations published on the website; other parties cannot claim copyrights to these works.
7. The copyright regarding copies of articles in official journals is owned by the authors and/or the publisher of the journals.

Use of the wordmark and logos
1. Only the first time that ‘ASL’ or ‘BiSL’ is used in a text or publication, the ® sign must be used: ‘Application Services Library®’ and ‘BiSL®’.
2. ‘Application Services Library ASL® is a registered trademark of ASL BiSL Foundation’ or ‘BiSL® is a registered trademark of ASL BiSL Foundation’ must be included at the end of the text or in the colophon or in the introduction of a publication that refers to ASL or BiSL.
3. ASL, BiSL and ASL BiSL Foundation logos may only be used by ABF and accredited parties (see Accreditation).

About ASL BiSL Foundation

ASL BiSL Foundation has managed ASL® and BiSL®’s key ideas for several years, and is now developing them further. In doing so, it is seeking to bring business and IT closer together. The supply of information – perhaps by its very nature – needs to take place via an integrated chain.Read more ...